In Yoenis Cespedes’s Dream, Mets Are Conspicuously Absent

The Mets have about a half-dozen players who may very well be ex-Mets by Aug. 1, and one player who is virtually guaranteed to be a Met through 2020.

And yet, while some of those movable parts would like to remain — Jose Reyes comes to mind — Yoenis Cespedes, the one immovable object on the Mets’ roster, apparently wants to finish his career elsewhere.

Welcome to another eventful day at Citi Field, where baseball often takes a back seat to clubhouse intrigue.

The Mets beat the Oakland Athletics, 7-5, on Friday, but the bigger story occurred before the first pitch was thrown.

Before the game, Cespedes — whom the Mets chose to build around, signing him to a four-year, $110 million contract last winter — told a reporter from The San Francisco Chronicle that he would like to return at some point to the A’s, for whom he played his first three major league seasons.

“I wish that happens,” Cespedes said in the Chronicle’s article. Cespedes said he had told his former A’s and current Mets teammate Jerry Blevins, “‘I don’t know how many years I’m going to play, but I’m going to play the last year of my career with Oakland.’ I don’t know if that’s possible or not, but that’s my goal.”

That comment, while benign enough on its own — Cespedes never said he wanted to leave the Mets now — could make Cespedes’s remaining time with the Mets more challenging.

“I still love the A’s, they were the first team to give me an opportunity to play in the big leagues,” Cespedes said in the article. “I love Oakland all the time.”

Cespedes also praised A’s Manager Bob Melvin in terms that some might interpret as disrespectful to Terry Collins, the manager of the Mets.

“I tell my guys here all the time that he’s the best manager for me so far,” Cespedes said. “I don’t think there’s a better manager than Melvin.”

Cespedes has also played for John Farrell in Boston and Brad Ausmus in Detroit.

Cespedes’s comments were another instance of what Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson likes to term “bad optics” in a season that has had plenty of them. Besides the rash of injuries that has derailed their season, the Mets have had a pitcher who refused to take a team-ordered magnetic resonance imaging test, another pitcher who failed to show up for work after a night of admittedly hard partying, and an infielder who publicly asked to be traded when Collins shifted him from shortstop to second base.

If nothing else, Cespedes’s professing his affection for a former team and manager could reinforce the perception that the Mets — who are far behind the Washington Nationals in the National League East and trail five teams for the second N.L. wild-card berth — are an unhappy team in disarray.

And it might also fuel the belief that Cespedes — who has three years remaining on his contract after this one, at $29 million per year — has grown disenchanted with his choice less than two-thirds of the way through the first season of his new contract.

Having missed 37 games earlier this season with a hamstring strain, Cespedes has underperformed, with just nine home runs and 22 runs batted in entering Friday’s game. His home run total has been far eclipsed by Jay Bruce, who has 24, and Lucas Duda, who has 17. Both have been prominently mentioned in trade rumors, as has Reyes, who has 35 R.B.I.

And while Cespedes said publicly that he wanted to remain a Met despite opting out of his first contract at the end of the 2016 season — walking away from the final two years at a guaranteed $23.5 million per season — his comments, however well-intentioned, might be used by the team’s long-suffering fan base as a reason to hold Cespedes up as the scapegoat for the team’s disappointing 2017 season.

They seemed to be headed for even more misery when Steven Matz allowed three runs on nine hits in five innings to start Friday’s game, leaving for pinch-hitter Curtis Granderson in the bottom of the fifth with the Mets trailing, 3-2.

The first two runs came courtesy of Michael Conforto, the team’s only 2017 All-Star, who crushed a 450-foot home run into the seats just in front of the Shea Bridge in remote right-center field.

They wound up taking a 5-3 lead in bizarre fashion in the sixth inning when, with Asdrubal Cabrera, Cespedes and Duda on base, T. J. Rivera’s single to right wound up scoring three runs. Cabrera and Cespedes scored in routine fashion from second and third, but Duda was thrown out going to third.

But A’s third baseman Matt Chapman then lofted a throw into right field trying to nail Rivera at second, allowing him to circle the bases for the Mets’ fifth run. A second Conforto home run, his 18th of the season, into the right-field seats with a runner on base in the seventh extended the Mets’ lead to 7-3.

Mets relievers Erik Goeddel and Addison Reed allowed the Athletics to cut the lead to 7-5 with two eighth-inning runs, but Jerry Blevins worked out of a bases-loaded, one-out jam with a foul pop-up and a strikeout.

The victory, the Mets’ third in a row and their fifth in the first eight games of their current 10-game homestand, should have been cause for celebration, or at least hope that despite the daunting task ahead of them, their playoff hopes were not quite dead and the mass trading deadline sell-off that appears likely may not, in fact, be a done deal.

But there was still the Cespedes matter to deal with, on yet another night at Citi Field, when a ballgame would play second fiddle to a sideshow.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: In Cespedes’s Dream, Mets Are Noticeably Absent. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe